Some time back, about 18 months in fact, I started on a project to port Samba 4.x to OpenVMS. Well, then there was a year that was very interesting, very demanding, and not much progress occurred on my Open Source On OpenVMS projects. Times change - now back working on the port.

Samba 4.x saw a major change in the build environment. It went from the classical configure/make and bash scripting to using a Python-based environment called WAF. So LOTS of learning and finding things that needed to be worked to make things work. The initial attempt showed that the subprocess.py module in Python had no support for OpenVMS. I did an initial implementation using lib$spawn and sys$crembx as well as some other items but I found that to limiting and required too many changes in the Python scripts.

My current effort has created a new version - soon to be available - of subprocess.py. This version uses more of the CRTL features to do thing closer to the way Linux/Unix works. So we have the use of the execv()/execve() functions and vfork to create the child. We had to implement some of the code in C due to the way vfork/exec calls work but that is easily called from Python and could be implemented in a single call rather than multiple, which would not work.

We have eliminated any changes to the Python scripts and currently have the configure process running to a point where it is trying to test for building extensions to Python, which is quite a ways down the process - several thousand tests.

As was previously announced, the dates and locations for the 2015 Oracle Forums are:

October 1-2, Burlington, MA, USA

October 5-6, Redwood Shores, CA, USA

October 12-13, Utrecht, Netherlands

October 15-16, Kista, Sweden

October 19-20, Vienna, Austria

October 22-23, London, UK

October 26-27, Paris, France

December 1-2, North Ryde, Australia

Registration for the 2015 Asia Pacific Forum being held in Sydney, Australia is not yet open but will be opening soon.

Note that the Burlington Forum will be held just following this yearís Connect OpenVMS Boot Camp in Nashua, NH. The Forum will be held at our Burlington, MA campus instead of Nashua, NH because we have larger conference facilities in Burlington. The Boot Camp begins on Sunday, September 27th and ends on Wednesday, September 30th and the Oracle Forum begins on Thursday, October 1st. The drive from Nashua to Burlington is about 30-45 minutes depending on traffic, so Boot Camp attendees may want to consider relocating to a Burlington hotel starting Wednesday evening.

We will be presenting an Oracle session at the Boot Camp. However, to get an in-depth understanding of the latest Oracle related developments on OpenVMS, we highly recommend that you attend the Forum as well.

The full Forum agenda is being finalized and will be posted soon on the registration web page.

Attendance will be opened to those who cannot join us in person. Remote attendees will be sent the information needed to join us in a live online Forum web conference. To receive this information, remote attendees must send an email to InfoRdb_US@oracle.com, after they have registered, indicating that they will be attending remotely. Remote attendees are welcome to attend any or all sessions.

Kevin and his team are very excited to be bringing the 2015 Technical Forums to you. They hope you will be able to join them.